A couple of days ago, Muireann Maguire — a Senior Lecturer in Russian at Exeter, who, in her spare time (ha!), blogs wittily at the Russian Dinosaur — wrote to me about her plans to translate the prose of Georgy Shengeli (1894-1956), who is remembered mostly, if at all, as a poet. Shengeli is far from a household name in Russia today, but he was highly regarded by the writers of his generation. Unfortunately, his career as a poet and verse theorist took a bad turn in 1927, when he published a booklet criticizing Mayakovsky, who was by then the most powerful poet in the Soviet Union. A polemic ensued, from which Shengeli did not emerge unscathed; he withdrew into translation, editing, and teaching. In the 1930s he headed the “Literatures of the Peoples of the USSR” division of the State Publishing House, commissioning translations from colleagues like Osip Mandelstam and Anna Akhmatova, who were unable to publish their own verse. In 1939 he took up a professorship at the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute in Moscow, but it appears he didn’t like the work; he saw many of his students as careerists, who set little store by the poetic tradition to which he had dedicated his entire life. In one of his last poems, written in 1955, Shengeli casts a wistful backward glance at the great flowering of poetic culture he had witnessed in his youth. The names in the poem belong to Andrey Bely, Valery Bryusov, Konstantin Balmont, Osip Mandelstam, Boris Pasternak, Maximilian Voloshin, Igor Severyanin, Ivan Bunin, Anna Akhmatova, Vladimir Narbut (certainly not Vladimir Mayakovsky!), Vyacheslav Ivanov, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Alexander Blok.

That fireworks display of names!
How history would cheer their victory!
Was this not Peter’s triumph? Not the coming
of the Third Rome? The feast
to celebrate the marriage of the West
with Russia’s boundless, all-embracing soul?

He knew them all. He spoke of them
to his ungrateful students, and they listened
respectfully, weighing their options:
How much demand is there today for star shine?
A safer bet would be the dullness of a hymn
or anthem made to order.

And he fell silent. Keeping to himself
his memories of the marvelous constellation,
which would remain unique forever…
He was old
and sad, like the last gun of a salute.

Shengeli is also one of the subjects in Lev Ozerov’s Portraits Without Frames. The poem, beautifully translated by Maria Bloshteyn, begins:

In the narrow hallway Akhmatova
repeated what she had said
in the room an hour earlier:
“Do something for Shengeli,
don’t forget about him,
please reread his poems…”

Shengeli isn’t forgotten. I myself will try to “do something” for his poems, and thanks to Muireann, anglophone readers will soon be able to discover his prose as well.

Last year’s volume of Cardinal Points included a “special focus” on the prose of poet Elena Shvarts (1948-2010). If this year’s volume, now available from Amazon in paperback and Kindle versions, has a special focus, it is on émigré writing. I was very proud to include the work of Yuri Felsen (1894-1943) and V. S. Yanovsky (1906-1989), two leading — and quite different — voices of the post-Revolutionary Russian emigration. Both authors were featured in Bryan Karetnyk’s indispensable anthology Russian Émigré Short Stories from Bunin to Yanovsky (2017). Here, Bryan presents an excerpt from Felsen’s first novel, Deceit (Obman, 1930), and Alexis Levitin, Yanovsky’s stepson — who is himself an accomplished translator from the Portuguese — shares his mother’s translations of two of Yanovsky’s stories. Other highlights include the first English translation of Marina Tsvetaeva’s verse play Fortune (Fortuna, 1919) by Maya Chhabra, Dmitri Manin’s phenomenally inventive renditions of poems by Nikolay Zabolotsky (1903-1958) and Alexander Galich (1918-1977), and fascinating essays on the translator’s art (with samples) by Stephen Capus and Stephen Pearl. Below is the full table of contents, including this year’s winning entries in the annual Compass Translation Award, which was dedicated, for the first time, to a living poet — Maria Stepanova. As usual, I thank my brilliant co-editor, Irina Mashinski, as well as Brown University’s Department of Slavic Studies.

Prose

Yuri Felsen, An Excerpt from Deceit (trans. from the Russian by Bryan Karetnyk)
Delia Radu, An Excerpt from The Book of Becoming MothersIan Ross Singleton, An Excerpt from OdessitkaV. S. Yanovsky, “Our Hospital” (trans. from the Russian by Isabella Levitin)
V. S. Yanovsky, “The Adventures of Oscar Quinn” (trans. from the Russian by Isabella Levitin)

Poetry

Innokenty Annensky, Three “Trefoils” from The Cypress Chest (1910) (trans. from the Russian by Devon Miller-Duggan and Nancy Tittler)
Alexander Blok, The Twelve (trans. from the Russian by Betsy Hulick)
Marina Eskina, “How We Buried You I Don’t Remember” (trans. from the Russian by Ian Ross Singleton)
Alexander Galich, “The Mainland Queen: A Labor Camp Ballad Written in a State of Delirium” (trans. from the Russian by Dmitri Manin)
Ben Holland, “The Queen of Spades: A Ballad Adaptation of Alexander Pushkin’s Short”
Story Patrick Meighan, “Slovinky, I and II”
Slava Nurgaliev, “The game of soccer, the unfinished” (trans. from the Russian by Yevgeniy Sokolovsky)
Gerard Sarnat, “Don’t Tread on Me”
Marina Tsvetaeva, Four Poems from 1922 (trans. from the Russian by Mary Jane White)
Nikolay Zabolotsky, Three Poems from Columns (trans. from Russian by Dmitri Manin)

It’s Women in Translation Month (#WITmonth, for the Twitter savvy), and I’ve spent the past few days listening to an exemplary translating woman discuss the finer points of her art and craft in various tents at the Edinburgh Book Festival. Jennifer was representing her Man Booker International-winning translation of Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights, which came out in the States last week and has been getting rave reviews in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, NPR, and elsewhere. On one of her panels, Jennifer was joined by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, the doyenne of Polish translators, whose rendition of Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead will appear from Fitzcarraldo Editions on September 12.

Sharing the stage with Michael Hofmann and Frank Wynne, Jennifer and Antonia spoke to a packed venue and held the audience riveted. The next day, at high noon, Wynne took on Ros Schwartz in a (thankfully bloodless) “translation duel,” moderated by Daniel Hahn. It was an absolute dead heat (tempted as I am to pun on Frank’s name). The real winners, of course, were in the audience!

I was moved and encouraged by the turnout at these events. Translation has come such a long way in the past few decades… Its practitioners are no longer invisible intermediaries; now they draw crowds at literary festivals. And so much of that progress owes to the hard work of my brilliant women colleagues.

I’ll let one such colleague have the last word. A few days ago, LARB published Yuliya Komska’s fascinating interview with the English-to-Ukrainian translator Tetiana Savchynska, who says the following about translation’s capacity to enrich the literary landscape, to help us acknowledge difference without succumbing to bigotry: “I often imagine a world without Babel, as it were — everyone still using the same language. I contemplate this possibility not only because I would be unemployed, but also because our literary world would look so different if there were no cultural and linguistic differences among communities large and small. Linguistically (though not politically), it can seem that we are inevitably headed toward a world without boundaries, with literatures becoming more uniform and less steeped in discrete cultures. Perhaps translation can work against that. It dismantles some borders but also preserves and guards the uniqueness of what is held within them.”

On August 12, 1952, thirteen luminaries of Soviet Jewish culture — including the Yiddish-language writers David Bergelson (1884–1952), Peretz Markish (1895–1952), Dovid Hofshteyn (1889–1952), Itzik Feffer (1900–1952), and Leyb Kvitko (1890–1952) — were executed on trumped-up charges of espionage and treason. This date has come to be known as the “Night of the Murdered Poets.” All the writers had been members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and had worked tirelessly during the Second World War to rally international support for the struggle against the Nazis and their allies.

I was asked to introduce Jewish Luck because its hilarious intertitles were written by none other than Isaac Babel. There’s a fun — likely mythical — story about this inspired match… We know for a fact that Babel loved the stories of Sholem Aleichem, but when he was approached to write the screenplay, he demurred. How could he, as an Odessan Jew, possibly create a believable luftmensch? After all, Jews from Odessa, be they rich or poor, are all driven people, with concrete goals — they’re big-city machers, not vague shtetl dreamers!

At the time, Babel was writing his gangster tales. And it’s true: his Benya Krik, the king of Odessa’s underworld, wouldn’t have given poor Menakhem-Mendl the time of day. But Mikhoels convinced Babel to take a chance. So Babel, as the story goes, found himself a real Jewish matchmaker (shadkhen) of the old school and followed him around for weeks. By the time the shoot started, he had acquired enough first-hand experience of the luftmensch lifestyle to craft the titles.

My sense is that the experience of working on Jewish Luck impacted Babel’s own prose. Around this same time he began to write stories about his childhood — much more tender than the gangster tales, and full of real luftmenschen. “In the Basement” (1929), for instance, features “Grandfather Levi Yitzchak, a rabbi who’d been run out of his shtetl for forging Count Branicki’s signature on promissory notes [and] was regarded as a madman by our neighbors and the boys in the street.” Levi Yitzchak, like his grandson, is a writer:

He wrote in Yiddish on square sheets of yellow paper as enormous as maps. The manuscript was called A Man with No Head. It described all of Levi Yitzchak’s neighbors over the seventy years of his life — first in Skvira and Belaya Tserkov, then in Odessa. Undertakers, cantors, Jewish drunkards, the cooks at brises and the crooks who performed the ritual operations — these were the heroes of Levi Yitzchak’s tale. And all of them were absurd, inarticulate people, with lumpy noses, pimples on their scalps, and lopsided rumps.

If Levi Yitzchak isn’t a luftmensch, then who is? Sholem Aleichem certainly impacted Babel, but I feel Babel also put his own spin on Sholem Aleichem. One of the great sequences in Jewish Luck is set in Odessa. It depicts Menakhem-Mendl actually succeeding at business — the business of a shadkhen. The action is too good to describe… You’d better see it for yourselves (starts at the 30-minute mark):

This smooth, plucky Menakhem-Mendl wouldn’t be out of place in one of Babel’s gangster stories. Of course (spoiler alert!), it’s only a dream…

Oh, and here’s a bit of Odessan trivia for you. The cinematographer of Jewish Luck, Eduard Tisse, was also responsible for Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, which was being shot simultaneously. Compare the delightful Odessa steps scene in Jewish Luck above with the famous montage in Eisenstein’s masterpiece:

Releasing a book into the wild is both a joyous and an agonizing experience: I’m always glad to see the creature in its natural habitat, on bookstore shelves, but I also know that predators roam the aisles… The first week is full of anxiety. Will others treat the book kindly? Will they even notice its existence?

I’m pleased to report that, like Elsa the Lioness, my newly freed translation of Mikhail Zoshchenko’s Sentimental Tales is off to a roaring start! Karen Langley — whom I and so many booklovers out there also know as Kaggsy of Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings — greeted the collection with a wonderfully sharp-eyed and open-hearted review for Shiny New Books, ending with the perfect description of its overall effect: “Humorous, profound, multi-faceted and tragic, these Sentimental Tales will have you laughing and crying at the same time.”

And other bloggers I admire have been just as receptive! The Opinionated Reader, Adventures with Words, and A Bookish Type have all offered thoughtful, sensitive appraisals of the book. The reception at Goodreads and NetGalley is also deeply encouraging. Which reminds me! My warmest thanks to the Goodreader named Calzean J., who made my day with this spot-on pop cultural comparison: “It reminds me of a series of Seinfeld episodes with George Costanza appearing as various characters.”

Kirkus and Foreword Reviews were also marvelously generous. And to cap it all off, in a big way, yesterday’s issue of The Economist carried a review that couldn’t have been nicer had I written it myself. Yes, I know the journal’s reviewers are anonymous, but I assure you: I didn’t write this one! In fact, I can’t even bring myself to quote it… If you’re interested, read it here.

I want to thank Meghan Forbes and Elisa Wouk Almino, the welcoming editors of Harlequin Creature, for hosting my version of Marina Tsvetaeva’s poem “Homesickness” at their new online translation platform. In my introduction to the poem, which appears below the translation, I write that it

pulses with an especially heavy charge of the emotional energy that infuses all of the poet’s work. It was written in 1934, when the poet felt equally alienated from the Russia she had left behind after the Revolution and the stifling émigré milieu of her new “home,” Paris. Tsvetaeva’s fellow émigrés found little to like in her inventive poems and took umbrage at her perceived rudeness. At the same time, she knew that returning to Soviet Russia posed unthinkable risks. It is this sense of being suspended between unacceptable alternatives that finds expression in “Homesickness.”

The poem captures the heartrending crisis of exile in short, violently enjambed lines that buffet the reader like fast-crashing waves. Its riveting rhythm and surprising slant rhymes are typical of Tsvetaeva’s technique, but here they serve a particular purpose. It is as if the poet is trying, desperately, to bring formal order to emotional chaos, to convince herself that she is indeed beyond homesickness. And thanks to the power of her talent, the illusion holds — until the last two lines. The Russian émigré poet and critic Olga Tabachnikova offers a memorable description of the poem’s effect in her book Russian Irrationalism from Pushkin to Brodsky (2015): “Pain is always greater and more stunning when it is denied, subdued, stranded, but makes its way all the same from under these inner prohibitions and constraints.” In this, Tsvetaeva’s “Homesickness” calls to mind another dazzling formal masterpiece by an émigré poet, Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art.”

I hope my translation communicates the effect Tabachnikova describes, and that you enjoy all the lovely, varicolored material at Harlequin Creature!

Today is the 60th anniversary of Mikhail Zoshchenko’s death (of that I am reasonably certain) and I spent the morning thinking about this “man like no one else.” The quoted words belong to the poet Lev Ozerov (1914-1996), author of Portraits Without Frames, which could fairly be described as a book like none other. In November, NYRB Classics will bring out an English version of this poetic encyclopedia of Soviet culture, translated by Robert Chandler, Maria Bloshteyn, Irina Mashinski, and myself. It includes Ozerov’s characteristically observant and insightful verse portrait of Zoshchenko, which Robert has rendered with characteristic acuity. Ozerov’s Zoshchenko is “swarthy, quiet, timid”…

His eyes had a wonderful glitter,
almost as if there were tears in them.
He seemed to me to be looking
somewhere into the depth of the soul,
as if the world lying outside
the soul were too much for him.
He’d been in the War,
he’d suffered concussion,
he’d been gassed. All this had left him
with heart problems.

“Heart problems.” Indeed. Ozerov is a master of the understated double entendre. In a marvelous scene that Ozerov witnesses firsthand, Zoshchenko reads two of his funniest stories before a crowd of delighted workers:

They roared with laughter.
I saw mouths twisted into strange shapes;
I heard snorts, neighs and bleats.
One man was slapping his hand on his knee;
another kept turning his head
madly from side to side;
a third was trying to silence
someone mooing and weeping beside him.
A fourth was howling, head
thrown back. Where were you,
Brueghel? O Goya,
where were you? I saw these things
with my own eyes.
And I saw thoughtful looks,
expressions of deep alarm;
I saw the shining faces of true
lovers of the word.

Then Ozerov sees “Zoshchenko, calm and pale, retire back stage, a little hunched.” The humorist turns to the poet and asks, “Why are they all laughing? I’ve been telling them terrible things.”

Zoshchenko knew, of course, that his stories were funny, but they were never frivolous. Their humor was rooted in real life, with all its horrors. Truly great humorists are never blind to the horrors of life; they see them clearly, but transform them, for our benefit — and often at great personal cost — into a laughing matter. This makes the terrible truth bearable, not invisible. It is necessary work, for which we ought to be grateful. So thank you, Mikhail Mikhailovich!

I look forward to celebrating Zoshchenko’s life this Thursday, July 26, at 7pm, on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, at the venerable Book Soup, with a reading from Sentimental Tales.

Last month I posted my translation of a boisterous poem by the happy warrior Denis Davydov (1784-1839). What I didn’t mention is that the translation will appear in an exciting anthology titled Russia at War, now in the works for Columbia University Press’s Russian Library. The anthology’s editor is the illustrious Tolstoy scholar Donna Orwin, who was kind enough to involve me in the project. Donna has launched a full-scale campaign to capture the best Russian writing on military matters of all eras, from the epic byliny of the medieval period to poems written in response to Russia’s most recent conflicts, such as the annexation of Crimea.

One theme that is sure to emerge is that history repeats itself. The 2014 annexation wasn’t Russia’s first foray into Crimea, which the former Empire first conquered in 1783-84, during the reign of Catherine the Great. A decade earlier, the Russian military took over two fortresses on the peninsula, at Kerch and Yeni-Kale. One of the more fascinating documents that Donna will include in her anthology is a poem, which we call “A Petition from Crimean Soldiers,” composed at one of those fortresses in the mid-1770s. As Donna writes, “[Its anonymous soldier] author traces the origins of war back to the story of Adam and Eve, and the passions of greed, pride, and vainglory it unleashed.” I will only offer three of the poem’s 16 stanzas below, to give you a flavor of the many treasures Donna’s book holds in store.

Yes, Adam is the subject of our plaint,
And Eve as well, for she too is no saint;
They weakened in those very crucial hours,
And due to this, their weakness is now ours;
And so, because both Adam and Eve sinned,
All their descendants are forever stained.

*

Adam and Eve now live in paradise,
While we are here, in cursed Crimean climes;
We chop wood with our scythes, as Adam had,
And gather up manure with our bare hands,
Lug dung upon our shoulders night and day;
For this, O Lord, our forbear is to blame.

*

Adam had served only a single God,
So why are we subjected to a squad
Of little gods? And each demands his honors;
Nor do we know which will take pity on us;
We sing their praises and we bow down low,
But never get awards that we are owed.

Maya Vinokour, a wonderful scholar and translator, is adding a dash of suspense to my translation of Mikhail Zoshchenko’s Sentimental Tales by serializing the cycle’s four prefaces and the first story, “Apollo and Tamara,” on All the Russias’, the NYU Jordan Center’s always exciting blog for, well, all things Russian! The first two prefaces went up today. If you’re hankering to hear “the shrill strains of some pitiful flute,” head on over — and watch that space for more melancholy zaniness!

And for those in a sober mood, I’d like to recommend an important piece I was honored to publish in yesterday’s edition of LARB. Bryan Karetnyk, whose exquisite translations have helped rescue Gaito Gazdanov (1903-1971) from oblivion, is now hoping to do the same for Gazdanov’s fellow émigré Yuri Felsen (1894-1943). He featured Felsen’s prose in his superb anthology Russian Émigré Short Stories from Bunin to Yanovsky (2017), and he has now written a poignant essay on the life and art of this “Russian Proust.”

On April 15, 1991, my family came to the United States as refugees from the Soviet Union, which was then teetering on the verge of collapse. I was eight going on nine, and after my initial excitement (candy bars! supermarkets!) wore off, I was struck by panic. The prospect of learning English from scratch paralyzed me. We settled in what was — and still is — the de facto Russian neighborhood of Los Angeles, and I was enrolled in a public school that was struggling to accommodate a growing population of displaced Soviet children. The first months were difficult, to say the least, but with the help of my dedicated if somewhat bewildered teachers, I made a go of it. My third grade teacher wisely paired each new student with a classroom buddy: another émigré who had arrived a bit earlier and could serve as a translator. It was the half-blind leading the blind, but the system worked. And my classroom buddy, Igor, is one of my very best friends to this day.

I could say a lot more about my experience, but the topic of this post is a book, a very funny book, to which I returned last week, on a whim. I first discovered it two decades ago, in a rusty rotating rack at the back of my tenth grade English classroom. The book is titled The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N (1937), and it recounts the linguistic misadventures of the titular hero, a hopeless but indomitable student of English at the American Night Preparatory School for Adults, and the headaches these misadventures give his equally indomitable teacher, Mr. Parkhill. Instead of “headaches,” I should have probably said “tsuris.” For Mr. Kaplan is a Yiddish speaker. How do we know? Clues abound. Here, for instance, is his description of his favorite “hobo” (he means “hobby”):

[I]n hiking is all enjoymint fromm soch Netcher. Dat’s vy I’m makink a hobby fromm hiking. Ladies an’ gantleman, have you one an’ all, or even saparate, falt in de soul de trees, de boids, de gress, de bloomers — all de scinnery?

Mr. Kaplan’s verbal pratfalls are easy pickings for comedy, but what makes the book a masterpiece is the dignity with which its author, Leonard Q. Ross, invests his hero. Here is how Kaplan ends his “hobo” speech:

As Mr. Kaplan uttered his own name, as if he were referring to some celebrity known to them all, Mr. Parkhill, by some visual conditioned re-flex, saw the name. He saw it just as Mr. Kaplan always wrote it. It seemed impossible, fantastic, yet Mr. Kaplan had pronounced his name in red and blue and green: H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N.

There is such nobility in this struggling immigrant, such winning pride! I grew up in a neighborhood of Kaplans, and I am glad to see them dignified even as they are being ribbed. And Kaplan’s creator, Leonard Q. Ross, knew his subject inside out. Ross’s real name was Leo Rosten (1908-1997), and he himself was an immigrant from the former Russian Empire, who grew up speaking both Yiddish and English. He is also the author of another of my favorite books, The Joys of Yiddish (1968).

I feel close both to the wonderfully accomplished Rosten and to the brilliantly bumbling Kaplan. They remind me that my own immigrant childhood is a gift, not a hindrance — and that my adopted country can, when it tries, become a warm and welcoming home to those huddled masses yearning for a better life. Just some thoughts that occurred to me on the 4th of July, and that I’m posting on my birthday, as I mark my 27th year in America.